Cyber criminals are ruthless. They want your identity, your money, your data.
As they look to exploit the anxiety around COVID-19 pandemic, we've seen the number of cyber incidents rise exponentially.
More than four in 10 organizations across 83 countries in KPMG International's new Global CIO survey said they experienced an increase in security or cyber incidents, resulting from the massive shift to remote working during the pandemic. The most-common attacks were spear phishing, which is a more targeted form of phishing that's also known as business email compromise, and malware attacks. Anecdotally, we've also seen a spike in ransomware attacks.
The publicity around cyberattacks helps raise awareness and reminds everyone to take stock of, or enhance, their cyber defences. But, as we're seeing, it's a double-edged sword. The highly publicized cases can be potentially damaging from both a financial and reputational perspective, and lead to an erosion of trust.
When we asked Canadians in a recent survey how concerned they are over the barrage of recent cyberattacks, 90 per cent of the respondents told us they are worried about sharing their personal or financial information with any organization that's been cyberattacked or suffered a data breach. Worryingly, our survey found that a quarter of respondents had their login credentials stolen from a trusted site, with that number climbing to 34 per cent for those aged 18 to 34.
